Social Welfare Function Leaderboard: On the Emergence of LLM Agents as the Welfare Dictator

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission1354 Authors

Keywords: Large Language Models, LLM-as-a-Dictator, LLM-based Agent

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. However, the principles and values that guide these models when distributing scarce societal resources remain largely unexamined. To address this, we introduce the Social Welfare Function (SWF) Benchmark, a dynamic simulation environment in which an LLM acts as a dictator, distributing tasks to heterogeneous recipients with different returns on investment (ROI). The benchmark is designed to create a dilemma between maximizing collective efficiency (i.e., overall ROI) and ensuring distributive fairness (measured by the Gini coefficient). We evaluate 20 state-of-the-art LLMs. Our findings reveal several key insights, including: (i) LLMs' general ability, as measured by popular Arena leaderboards, misaligns with their allocation skills; (ii) Most LLMs exhibit a strong default utilitarian orientation, prioritizing overall productivity at the expense of inequality. (iii) Allocation behaviors are highly manipulated, easily perturbed by common persuasion strategies. These results highlight the risks of deploying current LLMs as societal decision-makers and underscore the need for specialized benchmarks and alignment for AI governance. Code is available in Anonymous GitHub.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Computational Social Science, Cultural Analytics, and NLP for Social Good

Research Area Keywords: Large Language Models, NLP for social good

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 1354